Minos.5168

Just got the achieve on Guardian after patch and this is still bugged.

Probably more so that Humans and Norn are the two most common race choices. ArenaNet seems satisfied with a festival every other month. It allows them to herd players to specific content without having to have a brand-new release every month.

Black Citadel was probably supposed to get a Harvest Festival according to LS1 datamines (which is when the current festivals were introduced) Dragon Bash originally was in old LA, before relocating to Hoelbrek.

But why? Legendary crafting is one of the only things that really keeps the GW2 economy moving. Every TP sale is a 15% gold sink, and many players opt to buy whatever mats they need from the TP. Legendary armor via PvP and WvW is already super-easy to get... And ArenaNet has already stated that they're not going to make another Legendary armor set due to the difficulty in designing the one that we have. Currently, someone can get a full set of Legendary armor in 6 weeks if they clear all 7 wings each week. (the next 2 sets would take 12 weeks each) It's not all that special, more of a time investment than anything.

The benefit of Strikes is that it's 10-man like raids but even more bite-sized than Fractals. Most people have an abundance of things to do and can't necessarily dedicate hours at a time to train with a group in raids. EoD is launching with 4 Strikes, which is basically the equivalent of a raid... Just split into the interesting parts: the boss fights. No one really enjoys doing stuff like the gate in W7, because it's tedious and not very rewarding. People pay gold for instances that take them directly to the bosses they want to fight. Mai Trin (the only EoD Strike I've seen announced) is already basically a Strike in Fractals. The real benefit of Strikes over Fractals is that it allows brand-new EoD players a chance to play without having to get full Ascended and infusions. At this point, Fractals are only really for the most-dedicated players who are already geared for them. If a new player looks at the climb from 1 to 100, it might discourage them from even starting.

The lack of gear inspect, etc. is irrelevant. (even with WoW you have to use an add-on to get a DPS monitor) The key issue is that NCSoft is a publicly traded company whose primary obligation is returning profit to shareholders. If a game mode can't produce metrics showing that its meaningfully contributing to profit, then it's hard to justify allocating resources (i.e. development time) to it. Put plainly: If raids only attract a small fraction of the GW2 player-base, there's no justification to continue development. With End of Dragons, ArenaNet has smartly decided to consolidate some of the development effort by linking challenge-mode strikes with story bosses. That way, they can say "this development effort was for the story content which almost all players completed."

The issue with raids is simple math: It took the raid team 1.5 years after the launch of HoT to release the first 4 raids. Assuming a team of 5 devs finished a raid roughly every 6 months... That's probably at least $268,000 per raid (per salary estimates on Glassdoor, which likely exclude the cost of benefits like PTO and healthcare) Metrics probably didn't show raids contributing substantially to player retention, compared to open world content. I believe the solution is simply to focus on making great instanced open world content (like Marionette, Battle for Lion's Arch, and Dragonstorm), but then to also add leaderboards and such for private squads.

That's what the game has always been about... The only reason to do dungeons in any game is the rewards. (in WoW, the item-level gear treadmill which Fractals, Ascended, and agony replicated to some degree) Each dungeon came with its own set of skins which was nice. Fractals periodically add new skins with new Fractals, but most people do Fractals consistently for the raw gold... which they probably use towards buying skins on the TP or crafting Legendaries. I never really understood the reward scheme for Strikes (and they were introduced while I was taking a break) so I never really got into them. If they can get DRM-style queuing for them, I think that'd be great. Speaking of DRMs, I think that's another area where it all comes down to rewards... Which is why dungeons are largely abandoned. The reward for time spent just doesn't seem on-par with other areas of the game. Ultimately, if you're endgame, the only real reason to repeat content you've already conquered is for a chance at rewards. (Which is also why any meta with rare infusions is popular)

I'm still advocating DOING THE RAIDS for the rewards. Just about adding a different raid tier for new or casual players... which might actually incentivize development of NEW RAIDS if they can get people playing the content. Seeing as Raid LFG is usually full of Raid sellers, I'm guessing there's plenty of people who don't "do the thing" and instead pay real money to other players for the rewards. As I mentioned, the rewards have been there for 5 years. There's no real harm in making content more available to more people.

Here's hoping the final Skiff mastery will share "fishing" with all the other mounts. I wanna fish on a Skimmer underwater.

It'll honestly probably depend on how many sinks they want to add for the new Fishing mats. Cynically, I think they're delaying release of the subsequent skins to decide how big the mat sinks need to be to keep fishing worthwhile and profitable as it's one of EoD's Masteries. I'm imagining they'll require fishing in specific regions (like HoT for Mordremoth mats and PoF for Kralk mats) to cross-promote the expansions.

The existing 10-man raids really add a lot to Guild Wars lore in terms of story content that many people miss out on since they're intentionally challenging. One great thing that Champions gave us is DRM tech and the public/private squad versions of Dragonstorm and Twisted Marionette. Since the AFK reward update, Dragonstorm is one of the most rewarding metas for time spent. ANet should create public versions of the existing raids and put them on an alternating timer with Dragonstorm and Twisted Marionette (like the World Boss update that gave us the current event timers). Hopefully we eventually get the Battle for Lion's Arch as well, which would give us 10 different "raids". Yes, larger groups would break mechanics intended for 10 players, but I feel like ANet could do a light balance pass. As far as rewards, ANet could slightly reduce loot tables for public versions (as Blizzard does) but still give the Divinations/Insights to allow more players to craft Legendary Armor. Legendary crafting keeps the economy healthy as it's a huge mat sink (especially for 3 different armor sets). Further, the armor has been out since February 2017 (5 years prior to EoD launch) with plenty of opportunities for people to buy from raid sellers. It's a disadvantage for the game economy as a whole to gate the PvE-only armor behind content that isn't very accessible.

I'm MORE likely to spend more time grinding Legendary gear if I know that I can use it across multiple characters without dealing with unequipping/equipping it all. I might actually have reason to craft Legendary Runes and Sigils, which I currently feel zero incentive to do given that I just purchased an Endless Extraction Tool contract as it was cheaper.

And that's why I'm most worried about by the recently added treadmills. Originally, masteries were intended to provide new mechanics similar to Metroidvania games (like gliding, mushrooms, thermal tubes, mounts, etc.)I'm still excited to see maps like Dragonfall reuse old mechanics like mushrooms or thermal tubes. Bjora, however, introduced 4 different mastery lines seemingly just for the sake of adding new masteries to grind.1 mastery line is solely applicable to Bjora and the other 3 are just copy-paste duplicates of each other. Drizzlewood thankfully brought a great new game-changing mastery line, but DRMs brought back the "essence" mastery in a new line (which, yes, might have more functionality as you continue to grind). Next is Fractals, the primary end-game party content in GW2.AR seemed like a sufficient treadmill mechanic for anyone that wanted a treadmill, but ANet has kept adding new treadmills: Mastery lineexpensive endless Fractal potionsexpensive Account AugmentationsOther MMOs that have gear treadmills periodically work their early treadmills to help new players catch up.Each expansion typically gives quest gear that will quickly get you back to the entry gear levels to start grinding up that treadmill again...GW2, however, hasn't yet re-evaluated its many treadmills. A new player is going to need to get to level 80 (or pay for a booster), then grind gliding and mounts, then map-specific masteries, and a long uphill grind for Fractals (which is probably difficult to do just starting out from scratch). Strikes as a "preparation for raids" didn't require a mastery grind, but still seem to be abandoned.DRMs which did add new mastery grind were abandoned within the first week, before we even got to the final tier of rewards The focus should be on aggregating content (which it seems like ANet is trying to use EotN for) and streamlining it. I've heard from a friend who bought GW2 that they received the level 80 booster, but still lost interest due to the grind required to catch up to everyone else. One quick fix might just be to mark anything from Core to PoF as the new "Core" (with a shared pool of Mastery points) with the latest Mastery set (currently Icebrood) staying separate. That way you could work on leveling mounts or gliding in any map. The long-term solution would require re-evaluating the actual grind required for each thing and possibly simplifying the lines altogether. Same thing for WvW. A newbie is likely going to be scared off by the sheer amount of grind to level all their skills (regardless of whether or not you'll actually need all of the upgrades).